“We want to make sure it’s capable of carrying people; not just a ride that’s safe, but a ride that’s as enjoyable and interesting and thrilling as it can be,” said Nicholas Patrick, Blue Origin’s “human integration architect" in an interview after the Puget Sound Business Journal's aerospace event Wednesday at the Museum of Flight.

While Amazon’s Fire Phone rode in on a wave of publicity Wednesday, company CEO Bezos keeps his 300-person aerospace company Blue Origin hidden. The secretive space launch endeavor is headquartered in Kent, and also operates a test launch facility on Bezos' property in Texas.

Patrick shared some updates about Blue Origin after the PSBJ’s Business Journal Live breakfast event on space exploration and the business potentials for the region.

Patrick is someone with orbit creds, you might say, because he rode to the International Space Station on two space shuttles, Endeavor and Discovery, and did three space walks when he was there.

For Patrick the most amazing thing was seeing earth from about 200 miles up, the way thunderclouds show three dimensions, “like looking at your shoe from eye level,” he said.

“You won’t get the dynamic range of the eye off a TV screen,” he said.

But surprising things also were startling, he said. For instance, it can be incredibly hard to communicate with someone when you’re floating at different angles, he said. Also, your feet feel different when you’re no longer standing on them.

“What you want to do is get people there safely and allow them to experience it the way they’re going to experience it. Everyone’s a little bit different,” Patrick said. “It’s a question of pushing all the boundaries, we want the best experience possible.”

Patrick declined to share a timetable for a Blue Origin launch, which was delayed by a crash in 2011. The most recent update on the Blue Origin website is of the October, 2012 test of the space capsule’s escape system.

Blue Origin has a growing number of competitors in the privately run space race. Richard Branson is promising a flight of the Virgin Galactic space tourist spacecraft this year and about 700 people signed up to ride on Branson’s craft at $250,000 a ticket.

Patrick said Blue Origin has not started signing passengers up just yet.

“We have our eyes on our own short term goals,” he said. “We don’t have a published timetable, we’ll let people know. We’re working steadily and incrementally toward our flight goals.”

He adds that safety is of primary concern. Unlike Tesla founder Elon Musk’s Space X, Blue Origin’s New Shepard is designed primarily to carry people on sub-orbital flight. Then the craft would come back to earth via a parachute and ease to the ground with its own rocket engines.

“It’s coming soon. We don’t set a deadline that we feel we have to meet,” Patrick said. “We will meet our incremental goals on the way to launch.”